Taste buds on fire

I thought I had eaten Szechuan peppers before. But I had really only ever had sad, dried-up little berries, their vivacity drained by age and desiccation. My first fresh Szechuan pepper - Blue Thames flies in supplies from China - was a revelation.

It fizzed on my tongue, stabbing unsuspecting taste buds into life, the pungent, aromatic heat dancing a spiked-heel jig and leaving a vague sense of awed trauma. Blimey.

I was pointed in the direction of Blue Thames by a man who knows far more about Chinese food than I could ever hope to - absorbing all the nuances of this most sophisticated, ancient and diverse of cuisines is something of a life's dedication. In this country, we usually get bowdlerised versions of Cantonese crowd-pleasers, so big hurrah for anything different.

Welcome to the unlikely setting of a featureless riverside development in deepest Wandsworth and the fiery, revelatory tastes of Western China. Blue Thames brandishes all the hallmarks of the conventional Brit-Chinese: lengthy menu studded with sesame prawn toasts and sweet and sour pork; discounted banquet evenings; greatest hits set menus.

But head straight for the front of the menu to discover Szechuan-flavoured gold. Stateside foodies have been lapping up Szechuan cooking for decades but it's been slow to catch on here. Which is weird because, with its reliance on red chilli and in-yer-face flavours, it's a cert for heat-loving Brits.

If you fancy introducing yourself, this is an intriguing place to start. It's a vast, two-storey glass box overlooking the river. The ceiling glows a spooky blue and a tinkling, fish-filled stream frames a black marble walkway. There are walls of plants. Money has been lavished here, the hell with taste and restraint. Yet for some strange reason - maybe it's the location - it's virtually empty.

We ordered exclusively from the Szechuan Chef's Special page, with the exception of some of my beloved soft-shell crab from the regular menu. It turned out to be a disappointment - a flabby, frozen-tasting, pedestrian beastie.

But then came the arcana, thick and fast. Some bao zi buns, their dense, chewy and moreishly squidgy paste containing a fragrant farce of pork. Then Grandmother Ma Po's Tufu (sic), endearingly described on the takeaway menu as "a humdinger of a Bean Curd dish. Granny gave it to her son's [sic] and they never had colds!" Little wonder: bacteria would flee in the face of such an enthusiastic slap of spice.

Emperor Kung Pao chicken, aka kung po chicken, that stalwart of the side-street Chinese, showed its true colours here: quickfried diced meat with the sticky kick of black vinegar and the soft crunch of cashews. Double-cooked pork - long braised then stir-fried and deeply savoury - had a muddy earthiness from flubbery wood-ear fungi. Chewy fingers of 'sweet corn pie' - a kind of evolved fritter - were sweet and savoury, soft and crispy.

But the star of the show was the innocuous-sounding Chong Qing spicy chicken. An improbably enormous, rustling pile of whole toasted red chillies tumbled out of a basket ("They're usually 'facing heaven' chillies," said the knowledgeable accomplice. "Facing heaven" chillies? How absolutely gorgeous). This heap was liberally scattered with Szechuan peppers and little knuckles of chicken on the bone that had soaked up an astonishing amount of the twin blasts of fragrance. I have genuinely not had its like before. And, like, wow.